


Children of Krypton #3

by Vigs



Series: One Multiverse Over [7]
Category: DCU, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Alien Gender/Sexuality, Clark isn't buff, F/M, Original DC reboot, The Clark/Lois is still just flirting, Transgender themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-08-21 19:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16582301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vigs/pseuds/Vigs
Summary: The second surviving Kryptonian is a stranger in a strange land, and has to grapple with Krypton's destruction, everything that's different about Earth, and getting superpowers. Clark and his parents help as much as they can.





	1. Zor-El

**Author's Note:**

> Did anybody guess that the Kryptonian in stasis was Zod? I was hoping someone would. But nah, it's the future Supergirl.

The first thing Zor-El became aware of was that their mouth was dry as vacuum. They moved their tongue slightly, and it scraped against the roof of their mouth like two rocks being rubbed together.

The second thing they became aware of was shouting. It wasn’t in Kryptonian. They opened their eyes, wincing as they discovered that their eyes were as dry as their mouth.

A creature stood above them, almost Kryptonianoid but subtly  _ wrong _ . Its eyes were too low on its face, its nose too large, its chest too flat, its shoulders too broad, its head entirely hairless aside from overly-thick eyebrows. The shouting was coming from the creature. It sounded like it was happy and looked like it was smiling, but Zor-El couldn’t be sure it wasn’t baring its teeth and shouting in anger.

Zor-El blinked, and it must have taken longer than they thought, because when their eyes opened again a second figure had joined the first. This one looked almost Kryptonian, other than the strange flatness of their chest and a worryingly emaciated appearance. They didn’t look like they should be strong enough to stand up.

They were wearing the crest of the House of El on their chest.

“Hello,” they said. Their Kryptonian was strangely accented. “My name is Kal-El. Welcome to Earth.”

“Earth?” Zor-El asked—or tried to. The dryness of their mouth went all the way down their throat, they discovered, and they started coughing.

Kal-El said something that sounded angry to the hairless creature, in its language. The creature said something in response. Faster than Zor-El’s eye could track, Kal-El was gone and then back again with a clear cylinder of liquid.

“I’m going to help you sit up so you can drink some water,” Kal-El said. Soon Zor-El was sitting, somehow lifted by those weak-looking arms.

They sipped from the drinking cylinder slowly. Now that they had started moving, their whole body ached, but the water helped their mouth and throat, at least.

Kal-El… Zor-El knew that name from somewhere. Jor-El had a young child by that name. Could this possibly be the same being? Zor-El must have been in stasis. Why?

And then they remembered.

“Brainiac tricked me,” they said, still hoarse but at least able to speak. “It tricked us all. How many are left?”

“Maybe we should talk about that after you’ve recovered some,” Kal-El said gently.

“How many?” they demanded.

“As far as I know…” Kal-El sighed. “Just the two of us.”

The drinking cylinder slipped from Zor-El’s hand. Kal-El caught it before it could hit the floor.

The hairless creature said something, and Kal-El responded in its language. Zor-El wasn’t sure how long the unintelligible conversation went on. They were staring straight ahead, seeing only the memory of their beautiful planet crumbling.

“I’m going to take you somewhere else,” Kal-El said, removing the length of fabric that hung from their back. “Somewhere safe. But I’ll have to wrap you up in this on the way there. Is that okay?”

Zor-El twisted their head to the side, signaling assent. Kal-El simply stared at them blankly.

“It’s okay,” they said. Only one other Kryptonian left, and that one looked strange and didn’t understand basic gestures. At least they spoke Kryptonian, even if it was with an accent.

Zor-El bonelessly allowed Kal-El to wrap the red fabric around them, and then to pick them up. There was a sensation of motion, but the fabric was entirely opaque; they had no idea where they were going, or what their surroundings looked like. Perhaps Kal-El was trying to spare them some horror.

It wasn’t long before they were gently placed on some sort of cushioned surface. Kal-El removed the red fabric and put it back on.

They were in a large room with a single source of light, a yellowish oblong that hung from the ceiling. The surface they were on was covered in a fabric patterned with designs that appeared to be some sort of alien plant. There were a few strangely-designed chairs, a table, and in the corner, what appeared to be a heavily modified space shuttle. It looked like nearly all the internal space was occupied by a propulsion system. Zor-El’s specialty wasn’t rocket science, but all members of the House of El had been required to have at least basic knowledge in all the major scientific fields, and it looked to them like the vessel might be capable of interstellar travel.

“You came here in that?” they asked, gesturing at the ship.

“When I was a baby,” Kal-El said. “Jor-El knew the planet was going to be destroyed, but—”

“—but no one believed them,” Zor-El said, remembering. “Because Brainiac said it wouldn’t happen. And then it did.”

“Yes,” Kal-El confirmed. “I was raised here, on Earth.”

“By the hairless creatures?” Zor-El asked.

“Hairless?” Kal-El looked at them blankly for a moment, then laughed. “They’re not all hairless. Just some of them. Like Luthor.”

“Lu-Tor?” Zor-El repeated. “That was the hairless creature’s name?”

“Close. It’s more like Lex-Luthor,” Kal-El said. “Lex is the one who figured out how to get you out of stasis.”

“You are lovers?” Zor-El asked, unintentionally flexing their nose in distaste. The hairless creature had been  _ ugly _ .

“What? No!” Kal-El said.

“But—” Zor-El stopped and considered. “If you don’t even know that only lovers refer to each other by first name alone, how do you know Kryptonian at all?”

“The ship taught me,” Kal-El said. “Through mind-interface. Just the language, though. I’ve read about the customs, but I guess I forgot that one. I’m more human than Kryptonian, in a lot of ways.”

“Human? That is what the creatures are called?”

“They’re not  _ creatures _ , they’re—” Kal-El broke off. “How does Kryptonian not have a word for an intelligent creature that isn’t Kryptonian?”

“The Council’s position is that there are no such creatures,” Zor-El said. “Because they’re hidebound, xenophobic—or they  _ were _ , I suppose.”

“You disagree?” Kal-El asked, sounding hopeful.

“I disagreed with them about a lot of things,” Zor-El said. “I fraternized with members of lower families, wasted my time on frivolous pursuits unsuitable to a member of the House of El, and advocated for contact with other species. That’s why I was sent to monitor Brainiac’s core, on a satellite; because it was an unimportant position where I couldn’t cause any trouble. That’s why I survived.”

Zor-El discovered that their eyes were still too dry for tears. They were automatically glad of it. Overt displays of emotion were one of the things the Council disapproved of.

Maybe Kal-El wouldn’t care, though.

“What happened to your chest?” Zor-El asked.

“Ah, that’s sort of complicated,” Kal-El said. “My clothing keeps it bound closely against my body, so that it looks flat.”

“So that you may blend in with the… inhabitants of this planet? Do they not nurse their young?” Xenobiology was much more interesting—much more comfortable to think about—than the end of Krypton.

“They do,” Kal-El said. “But, uh… I don’t know the words for this. I’m not sure anything on Krypton had two  _ sexes _ .”

The last word was clearly in the language of the creatures— _ inhabitants _ — of Kal-El’s adopted home.

“I don’t suppose they’re advanced enough to have mind-interfaces,” Zor-El said. “It will be difficult if I have to learn their language one word at a time.”

“There are actually many different languages spoken here,” Kal-El said. “But I’ve been working on programming a Kryptonian- _ English _ dictionary into the ship. You might be able to learn from that.”

“ _ English _ ,” Zor-El repeated, trying out the strange sounds. This language seemed to have so many sibilants,  _ s _ and  _ th  _ and  _ sh _ . “We can try.”

“Do you think you can walk?” Kal-El asked. “Or would you like me to help you over to the ship?”

Zor-El looked at them sharply, but they seemed to be sincerely asking, not mocking.

“Assistance would be appreciated,” they said cautiously, “although it is unnecessary.”

“No problem,” Kal-El said, smiling. Zor-El hoped very much that smiles were part of the expression of both cultures. For all they knew, Kal-El was sneering at them and it simply looked like a friendly smile.

Leaning on Kal-El, who once again seemed impossibly strong for their build, Zor-El made their way to the ship and made contact.

“Requesting instruction in  _ English _ , to be remotely initiated on my signal,” Zor-El said.

“Request denied. Approval required.”

“Oh, sorry,” Kal-El said. “I guess Jor-El locked it or something. Let me tell it you’re authorized.”

Zor-El leaned against the side of the ship, out of Kal-El’s way.

“Identify previous contact as Zor-El,” Kal-El said to the ship. “Approve all information retrieval requests from Zor-El.”

“Authorization updated,” the ship said. Zor-El wondered whether Kal-El knew how much of an insult it was to give a member of the House of El information retrieval access without giving them information addition access. Probably not. Hopefully not.

“Thank you,” Zor-El said, and repeated their request to the ship.

“Request approved. Signal when ready.”

“I didn’t know you could remotely signal it,” Kal-El said, sounding admiring. “When it taught me Kryptonian, I just fell over right there. Nearly scared my parents to death.”

“Parents, plural?” Zor-El asked. “Do they raise their children communally?”

“Mostly in pairs,” Kal-El said. “It’s considered optimal for the two genetic contributors to live with their children, although there are plenty of other arrangements.”

“How odd.” On Krypton, the identity of the secondary genetic contributor of a child was considered private, although of course the Council kept records and people always gossiped. “Would you help me back to the horizontal surface, please?”

“Sure!” Kal-El smiled again.

Once Zor-El was lying down again, they hesitated.

“I seem to have spent so much time unconscious,” they said. “I almost don’t want to sleep.”

“You don’t have to now, if you don’t want to,” Kal-El said. “I know this must be hard for you, waking up on a strange planet and all. I don’t want to rush you.”

“I think,” Zor-El said, looking up at Kal-El consideringly, “that you may be kind.”

It was not a word with entirely positive connotations in Kryptonian, but Kal-El smiled again, and there was no chance that they were expressing anything but happiness.

“I do my best,” they said.

“Initiate English language transfer,” Zor-El said before they could discover whether their eyes were moist enough for tears yet, and the strange new world around them faded to darkness.


	2. Clark

Once Zor-El was asleep (and the “El” meant they were related to him, right? He never thought he’d have an honest-to-goodness  _ relative _ ) Clark went over the ship.

“Estimate duration of English language transfer,” he said. The answer it gave translated to about ten hours, so he could leave the old barn for a little while. He flew around to the  _ other _ barn and retrieved the clothing that he kept there. It always felt weird to be on the farm without anything over the Superman suit.

His parents were finishing dinner. He hadn’t had a chance to let them know that the other Kryptonian was finally conscious yet.

“Clark!” Ma said. “Good to see you.”

“Ma, it worked,” Clark said in a rush. “Their name is Zor-El. They’re sleeping in the barn now, learning English. Hopefully. Assuming I didn’t mess up when I made the dictionary.”

“You’re good with words, son,” Pa reminded him. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

“The ship said they’d sleep for ten hours. Then I can introduce you,” Clark said. He felt— he felt—

He felt like he was having way too many feelings right now. He slid into a free chair.

“Did they seem nice?” Ma asked.

“I’m not sure you can tell if someone’s nice within the first half-hour of meeting them. Especially if they just found out that their home has been destroyed and their species is basically extinct,” he said. “They seem… young, I think. I mean, it’s hard to tell, but a couple of times they sounded sort of like a teenager. Curious, maybe a bit rebellious, worried about being liked.”

“Rebellious?” Pa asked.

“Against how things were on Krypton. Maybe that’ll make things easier on them, I don’t know,” Clark said. “They haven’t gotten any direct sunlight yet. I’m being careful.”

“Of course you are,” Pa said.

“Clark, did you say their name was Zor- _ El _ ?” Ma asked. “Are they related to you?”

“Yeah,” he said, and smiled. “We’re from the same House. So we’re sort of like cousins, I guess? They didn’t keep track of family relationships quite the same way on Krypton. But yeah, they’re family.”

“Then they’re our family too,” Ma declared firmly.

“Well, don’t get too attached,” Clark said, although he knew it was way too late for him to take his own advice. “I might need to keep them locked up without sunlight. The barn will be fine for a while, but if it has to be long-term I’d need to get STAR Labs to build them a lead-lined room or something, and then just... never let them out. It sounds so awful, but…”

“But you’re being careful,” Pa said. “It makes sense, Clark. You’re doing the right thing.”

“I can’t believe they’re finally out of stasis,” he said. “I wasn’t even sure Luthor was really trying to wake them up.”

“I wonder if they’ll like the same foods you do,” Ma mused.

“I have no idea,” Clark admitted. “At least we know Earth food won’t poison them.”

“Speaking of which, do you want something to eat?” Ma asked. “We’ve still got some stew.”

“I think I’m going to head back to Metropolis until they’re about to wake up,” he said.

“Got another roof date?” she teased.

“I have a  _ job _ and I have a  _ city _ to protect,” Clark protested, as if he wasn’t hoping that Lois was sitting on the roof right now. She ate a little later than his parents did, despite the time zone difference; it wasn’t out of the question.

“Don’t let your Ma get to you,” Pa said.

Clark hugged them both and sped back to Metropolis. Lois was, indeed, on the roof of the  _ Planet _ . He smelled curry. She seemed to know all the best takeout places.

“Hey there,” she said when he landed in front of her. “Wasn’t sure I’d see you tonight.”

“They’re awake,” he said, grinning. “Or, well, they were awake. They’re sleeping now. But they’re out of stasis.”

“Woah,” Lois said, eyes wide. “Please tell me that’s on the record, I so want that scoop.”

“I mean, Luthor probably got it on the evening news, but yeah,” Clark said, sliding to a seat next to her. “All yours. Their name is Zor-El; I don’t know if Luthor caught that or not.”

“How do you spell that?” she asked. Clark laughed.

“However you want, Lois,” he said. “It’s an alien language. They didn’t use the Roman alphabet.”

“Shut up, I knew that,” she said.

“Uh, but it’s sort of first name Zor, last name El,” Clark said. “Except they’re more all one thing than in English. You’d never call them just El, and, uh, apparently you’d have to be  _ really _ close to call them just Zor.”

“Apparently?” she asked.

“I guess I’ve forgotten a lot. I called Luthor ‘Lex’ and they thought I was sleeping with him,” he explained, lowering his head into his hands.

Lois laughed.

“At least it’s a change from everyone thinking  _ we’re _ sleeping together,” she said.

“I guess, but of the two—” Clark cut himself off.

“No, no, go on,” Lois said, grinning.

“You’ve never had anybody killed,” he offered. “That’s definitely a mark in your favor.”

“You sound way too confident of that,” Lois said. “Also, wow, thanks. I’m so flattered.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “You talked me into a corner.”

“Yep, and you haven’t talked yourself out yet,” she said. Her grin was sharp and her eyes were glinting with mischief and he really,  _ really _ wanted to kiss her. She was right there. She wouldn’t mind—hell, she’d kiss him back.

“Plus I’m straight, so,” he said, and shrugged. “I’m going to have a really hard time explaining concepts like that to Zor-El.”

“Right, the whole one-gender species thing,” Lois said, apparently taking pity on him and allowing him to change the subject. “Should I use ‘they’ when I write about them?”

“I guess. I couldn’t exactly ask. Kryptonian doesn’t have gendered pronouns.”

“I guess it wouldn’t.” She took a bite of curry, looking deep in thought. “Did you find it, I don’t know, off-putting when you first got here? Weird? Gross?”

“Nah.” Maybe he’d tell her he’d been raised by humans someday, but not now. He didn’t need to make life more complicated when he already had Zor-El to worry about.

“Just alien?”

He shrugged. It was the Kryptonian worldview that seemed alien to him, not the human one.

“I’d love to meet them,” she said. “I can be their test human.”

“I’m sure I’ll introduce you eventually,” he said, his guilt over his lies of omission intensifying, “but I left them with the first humans I met.  _ My _ test humans.”

“I guess that makes sense,” she said, although she sounded a bit put out. “Whoever they are, they seem to have done a pretty good job selling you on Earth.”

“Yeah, they did,” he said, and nudged her shoulder gently with his. “You’re the one who sold me on Metropolis, though.”

“Really?” She sounded skeptical, like she thought he was just trying to mollify her.

“I figured I’d stay here a while, but I always planned to move on at some point,” he told her honestly. He’d had some idea of becoming an international correspondent for the  _ Planet _ and roving around the world, going wherever people needed him, but somehow Metropolis had become at least as much “home” as Smallville was, and Lois was a big part of that. Not that he didn’t head elsewhere for big natural (or unnatural) disasters, but Metropolis was definitely his home base. “But I think it’s probably good for me to have some personal connections. Plus, you just keep falling  _ off _ things.”

“Not as much anymore!” she protested, laughing. “When’s the last time you actually had to catch me?”

“It has been a while,” he admitted. “Don’t jinx it. Maybe you’re due.”

“I could hop off the edge,” she said, nodding towards the edge of the roof. “Reset the counter without inconveniencing you too much.”

“Please don’t,” he said, wincing. “I don’t actually like seeing you fall.”

“Guess it’ll be nice to have someone join you on catching duty,” Lois said. “For other people, anyway. I still expect personal service.”

“I don’t know,” Clark said, sighing. “I mean, yeah, of course that would be great. But it’s going to be awhile before they’re well enough for that to be an option. I think Brainiac put them in stasis right as the planet was being destroyed. To them, it’s barely been a day since they lost their home. I don’t think it’s even sunk in all the way. And once it does, I don’t know if they’re going to want to help.”

“Well, I know you’ll stop them if they decide they want to take over the world or something,” Lois said. “But if they decide they just want to try to live a normal life, let me know, okay? If they want to blend in, we might be able to do something with makeup… maybe glasses…”

“That’d be pretty tough,” Clark said hastily. This was  _ definitely _ not a train of thought he wanted Lois following. “And anyway, they might be better off working openly with STAR or something. They don’t exactly have a normal human education, but I’m sure they could share some valuable information.”

“Well, just keep it in mind as an option,” she said. “Hey, I might not get to meet them first, but I have dibs on their first exclusive, right?”

“I don’t know,” Clark said mock-thoughtfully. “Based on past trends, if you get an exclusive with them, people will decide you’re romantically involved with  _ both _ of us.”

Lois laughed.

“That’s why it’s gotta be me,” she said. “You know I can handle it. If you give it to somebody else—well, I think Kent might  _ actually _ burst into flames if people start speculating that he’s having sex with an alien. He’s so midwestern.”

“You know, I’ve heard a rumor that the  _ Daily Planet _ might not be the only news organization on Earth,” Clark teased.

“Just the best one,” Lois said. “Seriously, Superman, you want me doing that interview. You know I’ll be nice.”

“You’re never nice,” he said fondly. “I ought to get going. They’re only going to be occupied with learning English for another few hours. I should check up on the city and then get back to them.”

“Another few hours?” Lois asked, sounding impressed. “You can learn languages that fast?”

“With some technological help,” he said. “English is the only Earth language I’ve programmed into my, uh, my tech. Zor-El is unconscious right now, but assuming I did everything right, they should wake up pretty much fluent.”

“Except for the confusing stuff about gender,” Lois said. “And anything else that doesn’t translate.”

“Right.” What else wouldn’t translate, he wondered? There were some things in Kryptonian that didn’t make much sense to him, but it was harder to predict what parts of English wouldn’t make sense to a Kryptonian. Or to someone who’d been raised on Krypton, rather.

He’d always imagined that meeting another Kryptonian would make him feel  _ more _ certain of who he was and comfortable with his place in the universe. Instead it made him feel like some kind of weird hybrid.

“You’ll get your exclusive, I promise,” he said, standing up. “I might not be around as much for a while—I mean, I will be if there’s an emergency, of course, but Zor-El’s going to need me.”

“Right, sure,” Lois said. “I get it. But hey, let me know if you want to talk. Pebbles on the window, whatever.”

“Thanks, Lois,” he said, and smiled at her.

“Or,” she said, too carefully-casual to not be calculated, “We could actually decide ahead of time when we’re going to have dinner together. You know, pick a particular day and time.”

“If I could predict when the city was going to need me, or when Zor-El was going to need me, I’d take you up on that,” he said.

“Yeah, all right, fair enough,” she said. “Get going, hero.”

He wanted to kiss her. A kiss on the cheek wouldn’t be so bad, right? No, it would make things too complicated. Now wasn’t the time. It was a bad idea.

He kissed her on the cheek anyway, and flew away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, some actual Lois/Clark action! What does a cheek kiss count as, halfth base? =P
> 
> I guess I could be tagging these as "slow burn," but honestly nothing's even burning right now.


	3. Zor-El

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zor-El's gotten a crash course in the English language, but that's given them an *extremely* limited view of complex concepts like race and gender.

Again, Zor-El awoke in a strange environment. Coming out of a learning-sleep was much more comfortable than coming out of stasis, of course. Kal-El was there, but no humans this time.

“Hello,” they said experimentally, in English.

“Hi!” Kal-El said, grinning. “You’re understanding me okay?”

“Yes, I think so,” they said, and leaned their head back, going over the new information.”I have the words. I don’t understand all of them.”

“Sure, of course,” Kal-El said. “Uh, I’d guess that most of what you’re confused about is all the gendered stuff?”

“Mainly,” they agreed. “It seems like a great deal of human culture is built around simple anatomical differences.”

“Well, it’s not just anatomical,” Kal-El said. “I have, uh, pretty standard Kryptonian anatomy as far as I know, but I consider myself a man.”

“I can see how that might make things easier,” they said. “You wrote this dictionary, correct? Patriarchy is a complex concept, but you did a good job defining it.”

“Thank you,” Kal-El said. “Uh, no, though, that’s not why. There are certain associations with… the words femininity and masculinity were both in there, right? I feel like, well, a mostly masculine person, although I don’t identify with all of masculinity because a lot of it is toxic, and you can be masculine without being a man, but that’s not how I am.”

Zor-El blinked.

“That probably didn’t make a lot of sense, did it,” Kal-El asked. “You don’t have to completely understand gender, just… when someone tells you what gender they are, believe them, and assume that it’s at least somewhat important to them. I’m male, not just because it’s convenient, but because I feel like it’s right for me. I’d appreciate it if you use the associated words—’he’ and ‘man’ and so forth—to refer to me, although of course I’ll understand if you get mixed up.”

“I see,” Zor-El said. “Should I select a gender as well?”

“If you want,” he said. “But you don’t have to. And you definitely don’t have to right away.”

“Okay.” They considered what they had learned for a moment. “There appear to be multiple ways to make the same statement. I could have said ‘should I pick a gender too’ instead of ‘should I select a gender as well.’ I am using more formal forms so that I do not give offense, but how will I know when to speak more casually?”

“Oh, you can be casual with me,” Kal-El said. “You can be casual most of the time, really. The more formal language is mostly used in writing, or if you’re saying something that’s really important.”

“But there are no explicitly defined parameters?” Zor-El asked, then frowned. “I mean, there aren’t any set limits?”

“Not really. Humans are pretty casual most of the time. If you’re talking to the media, you’ll want to get more formal, but mostly being casual with them makes them feel more relaxed around you,” he said. “I can introduce you to some humans when you’re ready. My parents would like to meet you. But there’s no hurry.”

“I would—I’d like that,” Zor-El said. “I think some of this would make more sense if I could observe some humans and see how they act.”

“You’re sure you don’t need more time?” he asked, looking concerned. “I mean… Krypton…”

“I would rather focus on learning than on Krypton right now,” Zor-El said. They couldn’t quite wrap their head around the idea that it was gone. Surely it was too big to just...end. “Please.”

“Definitely,” he said. “Whatever works for you. I want to make this as easy and comfortable for you as possible.”

“Thank you, Kal-El,” they said. “You’ve been very kind to me.” The word did not seem to have any negative associations in English.

“Hey, we’ve gotta look out for each other, right?” he said. “Let me go get my folks. I’ll be right back.”

When he opened the door to leave, Zor-El noticed that there was another door behind it, almost like an airlock. This building didn’t seem to be airtight, though. Curious. Perhaps the definition they had received for “foyer” had been misleading about what type of building would have one.

It was strange to have to doubt the accuracy of the information they had downloaded. Normally, such information downloads were prepared by Brainiac, and were therefore perfectly accurate… assuming that Brainiac’s lies had only started when it learned about Krypton’s instability.

Zor-El didn’t think that Kal-El would have deliberately misled them, but that was what everyone had thought about Brainiac, too. And what everyone had thought about the Council, of course, and Zor-El had never believed that.

He came back through the double doors a short time later, followed by two humans: a “male” and a “female,” as far as they could tell. Both had grey hair and wrinkled skin, which would have been signs of age in Kryptonians, and apparently were so in humans as well. They also had lighter skin than the other human Zor-El had seen. Perhaps that was also a sign of age? But no, the term “racism” had been in the dictionary. Apparently differences in skin color were simply phenotypical differences made weighty by cultural baggage.

The male was missing some of the hair on his head, and wore some sort of device or decoration over his eyes—those must be “glasses.” The female was… very strange-looking. She definitely appeared to be past childbearing age, but her breasts were even larger than a Kryptonian’s would be if they were currently nursing, and her hips were as strangely broad as the male’s were strangely slim. If not for her age, she would have looked like a caricature of fertility. She also seemed to have some sort of decoration on her face, unless female faces were simply more colorful. No, this must be “makeup.”

The female was also holding some sort of tray. It gave off strange smells, which nevertheless reminded Zor-El that they hadn’t eaten in... well, years, technically.

“Zor-El, these are my folks, Martha and John,” Kal-El said, gesturing to the female and then the male with a smile. He seemed to smile a great deal. “Ma, Pa, meet Zor-El.”

“Hello,” Zor-El said to them, then turned to Kal-El. “Martha is female and John is male, correct?”

“Uh, yeah,” Kal-El said. “And  _ they _ don’t mind, but just so you know in the future, it’s generally considered rude to ask questions like that about people in front of them.”

“I apologize,” Zor-El said. Martha and John appeared amused, not offended, but Zor-El was still uncertain of their ability to read human faces.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Martha said. “Waking up on a new world like this must be very confusing for you. Worry about your own comfort, not ours. Now, Cl—Kal-El tells me you two are cousins, is that right?”

“Cousins.” The term was part of a worldview that viewed family relationships very differently than Kryptonians did—had—but wasn’t entirely inaccurate. “Close enough. Kal-El told me that you raised him. How did that happen?”

“Plenty of time for stories later,” Martha said. “You must be hungry. I made a couple of different things, since I wasn’t sure what you’d like.”

She placed the tray on the table, and they examined it more closely. There were two drinking cylinders like the one Kal-El had given them before—glasses, Zor-El remembered they were called, and apparently they were the only sort of drinking vessel used here, since the dictionary hadn’t had a translation for drinking bulbs. One was full of water, but the other held something brown and gently bubbling.

“That’s pop,” Kal-El said, seeing where they were looking. Zor-El wondered why a casual name for a male parent was also a name for a beverage. “There’s also a peanut butter sandwich, a turkey and cheese sandwich, some chicken noodle soup, and some brownies.”

He pointed to each of the bewildering assortment of objects as he spoke.

“There wasn’t much information in the ship about Kryptonian foods, so I didn’t know what might make you feel most comfortable,” he said. “The peanut butter sandwich and the brownies are vegetarian, if that makes a difference.”

“We didn’t have this many different kinds of foods on Krypton,” Zor-El said. “Well, maybe in the distant past. But aside from ceremonial foods on feast days, we generally ate nutrient bars made from… I think algae is the closest word.”

“Oh.” Kal-El looked taken aback. “Well, we do have nutrient bars, and uh, I think some places make chips out of dried seaweed? I could try to find you something like that, if it would make you more comfortable.”

Zor-El’s stomach rumbled.

“I’ll try this first,” they said.

“The peanut butter sandwich is probably the blandest, if you want to start with something simple. Or we could get you some crackers or something.”

Zor-El picked up the sandwich. The outer material was porous and yielded easily to pressure from their fingers. Bread, that was the name for it. They took a careful bite.

The taste and texture were not unpleasant, just… strange. Eating was not normally this intense a sensory experience. Almost before they realized what they were doing, Zor-El had eaten the entire sandwich, lost in sensation.

“I guess you liked it okay,” Martha said. She sounded amused and pleased.

The rest of the foods on the tray went the same way in short order. The brownies were so overwhelming that Zor-El could only manage tiny bites at a time. Drinking the pop was a bizarre experience; the bubbles popped in their mouth, creating an almost-painful sensation.

“Thank you,” they said, belatedly. “It was all delicious.”

“I’m so glad,” Martha said, smiling warmly. So many smiles. So many easy displays of emotion. So much kindness.

Zor-El burst into tears.


	4. Clark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm borrowing Kryptonian names from comics canon, but they aren't necessarily referring to the same characters.

Clark had tried so hard to make Zor-El as comfortable as possible without exposing them to sunlight, and it had seemed to be working until they suddenly started crying. He didn’t know what to do.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Ma said, kneeling next to where Zor-El was sitting. “You must be so overwhelmed. Can I give you a hug?”

“No, please,” Zor-El said, still crying. They lapsed into Kryptonian after that. “You’re treating me like a child and I don’t know if it’s sincere or mocking. I may have been an outcast but I am still an El, I should not show such weakness.”

“No, hey,” Clark said, sticking to English. “We don’t think you’re weak. It makes sense for you to be sad and overwhelmed.”

“I like it,” Zor-El said, and it sounded like a confession. “The kindness, the food, I like it. I should not like another planet when Krypton has been destroyed.”

“I’ve felt like that too,” Clark said. “I don’t even remember Krypton, and I love the Earth. I’ve felt disloyal for that, sometimes. But Earth—humans—they’re great. I’m Kryptonian, but this is my home. It can be your home too.”

They cried harder. Ma started to get up, probably worried that she was making things worse with her proximity, but Zor-El threw their arms around her in a clumsy hug. Ma cautiously hugged back.

“I wish there was someone you could talk to,” Clark said. “Some kind of professional, I mean. But there aren’t exactly any therapists who specialize in Kryptonians. There’s just me.”

“We didn’t have therapists on Krypton,” Zor-El said, laughing bitterly through their tears. “Just Brainiac. I don’t think talking to it about this would be very helpful.”

“That doesn’t sound like it would  _ ever _ have been very helpful,” Clark said. “Unless it’s changed an awful lot since, you know, then.”

“Brainiac was in charge of correcting aberrant thought patterns,” Zor-El said. Their tears were slowing, and they were clinging a little less desperately to Ma, although they hadn’t let go. “I talked to it a  _ lot _ . I don’t think it did help, though.”

Clark’s previous ideas about what Krypton had been like were crumbling by the second. The ship’s database had shown him people in rich clothing and golden circlets, elegant spires of architecture, vast institutes dedicated to learning. It hadn’t had anything about only eating nutrient bars, or “correcting aberrant thought patterns,” or crying and wanting a hug being signs of weakness.

“How long were you on that satellite?” he asked. “Before you were put into suspended animation, I mean.”

“In Earth terms… eighteen months, I think?” Zor-El said. “My full term would have been several years. They didn’t want me in contact with In-Ze or Ak-Var or Van-Zee or any of my friends. I was only allowed to communicate with Brainiac and with other members of the high Houses—the Els, the Ems, people like that. None of my friends… but I guess all my friends are dead now.”

“I’m sorry,” Clark said helplessly.

“Jor-El called me sometimes,” Zor-El said, almost sounding like they were trying to comfort  _ him _ . “Just to talk, not to lecture. They were nice.”

“But not nice enough to keep you from being banished to a satellite,” Clark said.

“Could have been worse,” Zor-El said with a shrug. “Could have been the Phantom Zone.”

Clark decided not to ask.

“I know it’s not the same,” Pa said, “but I didn’t get on well with my folks. Signed on with the military as soon as I could, just to get the hell out of Smallville—and then I found out that was worse, and got the hell back to Smallville. My pa was gone by then, and my ma was sick; she wasn’t around for much longer either. I loved ‘em and I hated ‘em, both at the same time, and when they were gone I didn’t know whether I was grieving or relieved. Realized after a while that it was both, and that I’d probably always be feeling a bit of both, and that’s okay. You don’t have to pretend it was perfect because it’s gone, or that you don’t miss it because it wasn’t perfect.”

Pa didn’t often talk for that long, and never in front of strangers. Clark supposed he’d accepted Zor-El as family too, even if he didn’t show it the same way Ma did.

“I didn’t understand all of that,” Zor-El admitted, “but I think it does help. I didn’t get along with my parent either. I suppose they’re gone now too.”

“We’re not going to look down on you for having feelings, whatever they might be,” Ma said firmly. “However you need to get through this is just fine. You just let us know what you need, and if you don’t know what you need, that’s fine too.”

“Clark,” Pa said under his breath, probably too quiet for Ma or Zor-El to hear, “You going to tell them about the sunlight?”

Clark moved over towards Pa, so they could both talk privately.

“You think it’s safe?” he asked quietly. “You know I trust your judgement, Pa.”

“I don’t think they should be out in the sun yet,” Pa said. “Too erratic. But I think they might understand that. Might be better if they know why they shouldn’t go outside.”

Clark had to agree. The idea of Zor-El trying to take over the world seemed more and more unlikely the more they talked. He returned to Zor-El’s side.

“If you want to talk about Krypton, I’m here to listen,” he said. “And if you’d rather hear about Earth, I’d be happy to tell you anything you want to know. Whatever you need.”

“I don’t think I can think about Krypton for too long at a time right now,” Zor-El said, gently disentangling themself from Ma. “It’s too big. I’d like to learn about Earth, but I don’t know what to ask.”

“Well, there are a few things you should probably know as a Kryptonian on Earth,” Clark said. “Like why you probably shouldn’t go outside just yet.”

It had been a while since Clark had to give someone a rundown of his powers; these days, pretty much everybody already knew. Zor-El seemed skeptical at first, but was quickly won over by brief demonstrations of flight, super-speed, and heat vision.

“But—why?” they asked, when he’d finished explaining. “What is the mechanism by which it works?”

“I have no idea,” he admitted. “Dr. Hamilton—he’s a scientist I work with—he’s the one who figured out that it has to do with sunlight, but we still don’t know exactly  _ why _ .”

“It’s always been known that strange things happen away from the light of Rao,” Zor-El mused, “but I don’t think anyone knew it would be things like  _ this _ . Is that why your muscles are so underdeveloped?”

“Yeah,” Clark said, rubbing his arm self-consciously. “There’s no way for me to really get a workout, or even just the regular exercise from walking around, and all.”

“Oh, good,” Zor-El said. “I was afraid it was some nutrient deficiency.”

“I don’t think so, no,” he said. “Anyway, the reason I wrapped you up in my cape and then brought you somewhere without windows was because I didn’t think you should have to deal with grieving and figuring out new superpowers at the same time. Once you start going outside, they’ll start developing.”

“And you weren’t sure you could trust me with that much power,” Zor-El said shrewdly. “What changed your mind?”

“You just… seem like a good kid,” Clark said, shrugging. “I don’t think you’d start hurting people for fun, or trying to take over the world.”

“You could rule this world, if you wanted to,” Zor-El realized.

“I’m not interested in that,” Clark said firmly, his voice unconsciously dropping into the register he used as Superman. “People deserve to govern themselves. And if you tried to take over, I’d stop you.”

“I won’t, I swear,” Zor-El said. “Even if I wanted that kind of power, I don’t think I could set things up so the world would produce more people like you three. How does the government of Earth work? Is there a Council?”

“Well, there’s not actually one government for all of Earth,” Clark said, sitting at the table across from them. “Different countries have different kinds of governments. I think Krypton was what we’d call an oligarchy…”

Zor-El seemed very interested in his rundown of government types, asking intelligent questions and apparently soaking up the information like a sponge. Pa left to get back to work—farms didn’t start running themselves just because you had aliens visiting—but Ma sat at the table with them and interjected the occasional opinion. (Clark tended to be a good bit more pro-establishment than she was.)

“It’s like speculative fiction,” Zor-El said. “People used to write stories about what life might be like on other worlds, disguised as xenobiological research papers. They’d usually get banned pretty quickly, but we’d save copies and pass them around. I don’t think anyone came up with anything like this, though.”

“Well, there’s a saying on Earth that truth is stranger than fiction,” Clark said.

“That seems a little overstated. Ak-Var makes up these stories about living beings made entirely of gas, who…” They stopped themself and swallowed.”Used to make up, I mean.”

“I’m sorry,” Clark said helplessly.

“I think maybe I’d like to be alone for a little while,” they said. “Would that be alright?”

“Of course. Whatever you need.”

Zor-El stood and walked over to the bed, lying down on it and staring upwards at the ceiling. It reminded Clark creepily of how they’d looked while they were in stasis. He pushed down the feeling that there had to be  _ something _ he could do; even Superman couldn’t fight someone else’s grief.

“I’ll come check on you in a bit,” Ma said, and gently led Clark out of the barn.

“I wish I could help them more,” Clark said while they walked back to the house.

“They’re going to need time,” Ma said. “They lost a lot, and it sounds like they were in a bad situation even before that. Even you can’t punch away trauma.”

“I know, I know,” he said.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Me? I’m okay, why?”

“Well, you’ve taken on responsibility for this traumatized kid on top of everything else, for one thing,” she pointed out. “And it sounds like you might be learning some things about Krypton that don’t quite match how you thought it was.”

“I can handle it,” he said automatically. “Taking care of Zor-El, I mean. You and Pa are taking on more than I am, having them stay here. Krypton… I don’t know. I don’t think I’m ready to figure out how I feel about that.”

He’d never really had to think critically about Krypton. It had always been sort of Edenic in his mind. The Krypton Zor-El had known seemed like a completely different place.

“That’s okay,” Ma said. “But you can talk to me if you need to.”

“I know, Ma,” he said. He also knew that if he tried to protest that what Zor-El was going through was much worse than him having a few illusions shattered she’d lecture him about valuing his own feelings. Obviously he wasn’t going to complain to Zor-El about it, but that didn’t mean his feelings weren’t valid and blah blah blah, he pretty much could have delivered the lecture himself. That didn’t keep him from feeling petty, mourning an idea that had never really existed when they were mourning their entire planet.

“I’ll take them into town sometime when they’re ready,” Ma said. “I know they can’t be out during the day, but isolation isn’t good for anybody. I’ll just say they’re a relative come to visit.”

Anywhere but Smallville, Clark might have protested that Zor-El shouldn’t be posing as a human in public until they had the muscle control to hold their face into a more human configuration, but  _ he _ hadn’t had that kind of control when he was little and everyone had just sort of gotten used to it. It’d probably just make the story that they were a relative more believable. And if they said or did anything a little odd, well, the Kents were a little odd.

Clark wasn’t sure how many people in Smallville had put together that he was Superman. No one had ever said anything to him or his folks about it, but it had to be at least a few.


	5. Kara

Zor-El was a bit disappointed that Kal-El was too busy elsewhere to spend too much time with them—apparently he felt that being able to do more than most humans obligated him to put a great deal of effort into helping them, although he was careful to say that Zor-El didn’t have to make the same decision—but Martha was a near-constant, comforting presence. They spent hours talking, and Martha brought them books for when she couldn’t be there herself.

“Some of these are Clark’s old schoolbooks,” she said. Kal-El had shared his human name a while ago. “I brought the math and science books out too, just to give you an idea of how much most humans know about those.  _ These _ books are my books. You let me know if you have any questions, okay?”

Martha’s books were much more interesting than Kal-El’s. Books on gender, books on sex, book after book on different types of discrimination. Those last would have been depressing—clearly the Earth was no paradise—except that they all seemed to be written with the underlying assumption that all people were equal and should be treated as such.

It had been accepted knowledge on Krypton that not everyone was equal. Part of Zor-El’s aberrance had been their preference for the company of members of lower houses—people who were officially inferior to them. Books like this would have been banned on Krypton.

“Martha,” Zor-El asked after a few weeks of talking and reading, “What is it that you like about being female?”

“Well, now, let’s see,” Martha said. “Partly it just sort of  _ feels _ right, in a way that I can’t really explain. Being a woman and a wife and a mother just feels like me, in a way that being a man and a husband and a father wouldn’t. But more concrete things… hm. I like being able to concentrate on my appearance sometimes, try to make art out of the way I look, although I suppose I was better at that when I was younger. I like showing my feelings and showing that I care about people, giving hugs when I want to and crying when I need to. I like being gentle. I like spending time with other women, and when I do, I feel like yep, I’m one of them. None of those things  _ make _ me a woman—a man could do any of those things, or someone who wasn’t a woman or a man—but I’m a woman, and those things are all associated with women, and they all feel right to me.”

That had very nearly been a list of things that had been forbidden on Krypton.

“I think that perhaps I would like to be a woman too,” Zor-El said hesitantly. “If that wouldn’t be appropriative.” One of Martha’s books had had a lot to say about appropriation.

“Course not!” Martha said. “You’re allowed to be a woman, and you’re allowed to try it and find out  you don’t like it, too. Some folks would say otherwise, but they’re wrong.”

Zor-El had been wearing old clothes of Clark’s, from when he was younger, but after that conversation Martha went out and bought a few dresses for her. Wearing them made Zor-El feel almost giddy. She was decorated just for the sake of being  _ pretty _ , a word that essentially had no Kryptonian equivalent.

Clark had said that she could probably go out at night, especially if there wasn’t much of a moon, so Martha and Zor-El went out for a late dinner in town. Zor-El’s hair had grown long enough to brush at her shoulders, and she was wearing a dress patterned with yellow flowers that swirled around her legs if she turned quickly. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt so free.

“Now, folks here don’t know Clark’s an alien,” Martha warned her. “Well, some of them might, but they’re too polite to mention it. So you’re going to be my niece, just another human visiting from out of town, if that’s alright with you.”

“I will need a human name,” Zor-El said.

“If you’re my niece, your last name’s probably Danvers,” Martha said. “That was my last name before I got married. Got anything in mind for a first name?”

“Something short,” she said. Some human names were so long. “And no esses.” Her sibilants sometimes slipped into z’s still.

“My ma’s name was Catherine, but that’s probably too long for you,” Martha said. “How about Kara?”

“Kara,” Zor-El said, testing the sound of it. “I like it. Kara Danvers.”

The sun had set and Earth’s enormous moon was entirely shadowed by the planet—a “new moon,” it was called for some reason—and so during the drive from the Kent residence to the Smallville Diner, the only lights were the headlights of the car and the stars above.

When she was stuck on Brainiac’s satellite, Kara had spent a lot of time looking at the stars. Krypton hadn’t been much to look at from space, cities and algae beds and blank, empty spaces. One of Martha’s books had been about environmentalism. Kryptonians hadn’t ever really discovered the concept. Not much had lived on Krypton that wasn’t domesticated.

It had rained during the day, and the night air smelled like plants growing. It was almost overpowering.

“Now, if anything’s too much for you, you tell me, and we’ll go straight home,” Martha said. “I know you haven’t been around many people in a while. Not that the diner’s going to be crowded, but there’ll be some strangers there, and I guess we’re all aliens to you.”

“I like aliens,” Kara said.

“You know, I’ve always felt that way,” Martha replied with a smile.

The diner was bright and filled with an odor that Martha told her was food being fried. There were other humans there, men and women. The men seemed like sad sexless things to Kara, all straight lines and flat planes, but the women were beautiful, curvaceous and colorful. Their waitress wore a thick layer of makeup, blue eyelids and red lips and pink cheeks, and had piled her hair into a dome on top of her head. Kara could barely take her eyes off her. She had clearly put a great deal of time and effort into looking just the way she wanted to. It was an art form and a language, signaling something that Kara couldn’t yet decipher.

“What can I get you ladies?” she asked, and Kara grinned.

Almost as good as being unquestioningly accepted as a human and as a “lady” was the discovery of French fries. She remembered reading something about the French being known for their cuisine, and obviously the reputation was well-deserved. Chicken fingers were also good, although the name raised questions that she knew she probably shouldn’t ask in public.

“I like being Kara Danvers,” she confessed to Martha on the drive home.

“I’m so glad,” Martha said.

Clark came by the next day, and seemed surprised to find Kara in a dress.

“I like it,” she told him, turning so that it would swirl around her legs. “It isn’t utilitarian or ceremonial. Just pretty.”

“It is,” Clark agreed. “Do you want me to start using ‘she’ and ‘her’ for you?”

“Yes! And call me Kara,” she said. “Kara Danvers. Martha gave me the name. I’m her niece.”

“Well, I guess the rest of the family isn’t likely to show up and dispute that,” Clark said. “They don’t really leave Star City.”

“I want to see more of Earth,” Kara said. “I want to meet more people. I’m letting you decide when I can go outside during the day, but… I’d like to. I’d like to be able to fly. I want to be able to help you.”

“You don’t have to decide that right away,” Clark said. “I promise, we’re not going to keep you trapped in Smallville if you decide you don’t want to be a superhero. If you want to write stories, or work with Earth scientists, or anything else, you get to pick for yourself.”

“So I should just watch you save people’s lives and know that I could help and not do anything?” she asked, hands on her hips. She’d picked the gesture up from Martha, and thought it was a good one. “You wouldn’t do that. I like this planet. I want to help it.”

“I’m not going to say you can’t, if that’s what you want to do, but you need to know what you’d be getting into,” Clark said. “It’s hard, and it’s… alienating. They call me Superman, and when I’m Superman I have to be perfect all the time, perfect and polite and some people  _ still _ hate me, just for being an alien.”

“Mm,” Kara said, considering. “Superwoman is too long a name. Could I be Supergirl?”

“Whatever you want to call yourself is fine. That isn’t the issue. Sometimes it hurts,” he warned. “Not just physical pain—there’s not a lot that’ll be able to hurt you once you have your powers, although people always seem to be able to get their hands on something that will—but emotional, too. Sometimes you lose people. Your senses will get stronger too, you’ll be able to hear people who need help and know that you can’t help all of them. ”

“You’d lose fewer people if I was helping,” Kara said. “You’d be able to help more of them. And I’d still hear them needing help if I decided I wasn’t going to do anything about it. How do you think I’d feel then? I want to help.”

“Can I hug you?” Clark asked, and his voice sounded kind of choked up. Kara opened her arms, and he gave her a careful squeeze—although she wouldn’t have known it was careful, if she didn’t know he could have crushed her if he’d really squeezed hard.

“You have standing permission for hugs,” she said. “You and Martha and John. I have a lot of hugging to catch up on, and you’re my family.”

“Family” was like “kind,” one of those words that had such different connotations in English and Kryptonian that they were almost entirely different concepts. “Kind” had meant weak, coddling, lax; “family” had meant rules and restrictions, a stifling box that could never be broken out of.

Kryptonian had a word for the embrace of lovers and a word for how a parent holds a child, but neither of those had encompassed the possibilities of hugs. Zor-El had never hugged their friends.

Well—there had been one time, with In-Ze, when the two of them had been caught up in the moment and wanted to forget that romance between them was impossible. It had never been repeated. Kara shook her head, trying to push away the memory.

“I’m okay with you starting to take in some sunlight, if you’re sure you want to,” Clark said. “But before you decide about this whole Supergirl thing, I want you to watch some of the news coverage of Superman, okay? From one of the channels that doesn’t like me. You should know some of the things people will say about you. And I know Ma gave you some books about feminism; you should know people are going to say even worse things about you than they do about me.”

“We can watch the news later,” Kara said impatiently. “I want to see the farm in the sunlight, Clark. I want to see the sky of my new home.”

Clark hugged her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to handle the shift in Kara's name and pronouns as gracefully as I could, changing the way I referred to her at the same time that the way she thought of herself changed. Normally, I wouldn't use a trans character's pre-transition name or pronouns in the narration even if they hadn't transitioned yet, but I feel like Kara is sort of a different case because of her different cultural and species background. If anybody (particularly any fellow trans people) has any feedback on how I handled this, please let me know!
> 
> Oh, and I know that Martha's maiden name in canon is "Clark," but this Martha doesn't particularly like her birth family, and probably wouldn't have named her son after them. The Danvers family that adopts Kara in various continuities doesn't really exist here.


	6. Clark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: The Talk, but with superpowers. Very clinical, but extremely awkward.
> 
> Also, it's mentioned that the Sun looks green to Kryptonians. [It probably would!](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/29/why-are-there-no-green-stars/#.W_69EuhKiM9)

Clark felt a twinge of nervousness when he took Zor-El—Kara—outside. She was at least as old as he’d been when his powers had finished developing, and he didn’t know how sunlight would affect her. Maybe it would still take her fifteen years or so to get her powers, or maybe they’d hit her all at once.

But he couldn’t keep the kid locked out of the sunlight forever. Not when she’d so clearly fallen in love with the Earth.

She blinked in the light, and there weren’t lasers uncontrollably shooting out of her eyes when she opened them or anything, so that was a good sign.

“It’s so _green_ ,” she said, hushed.

“Yeah, the corn’s coming in good,” Clark said.

“The light, I mean,” she clarified. “The sunlight. I didn’t realize it would be so green!”

“...huh.” When Clark had been a kid, the crayon drawings displayed on the fridge had always shown a green sun. “Humans say it’s yellow.”

“What?” Kara shaded her eyes and looked towards the sun. “It’s clearly green.”

“I always thought so, too,” Clark said. He could feel a goofy grin on his face. So it _wasn’t_ just him! “I’ll have to ask Dr. Hamilton about that sometime.”

“Rao never looked all that red,” Kara said. “Maybe we evolved with different color perception from humans. Anyway, show me around!”

Clark obeyed. Kara was entranced by everything, from the corn to the tractor to the chickens.

“Where are the fingers?” she asked, and Clark laughed hard before he started to explain the idiosyncrasies of food names.

She especially liked the house.

“It’s so colorful!” she said.

“It is that,” Clark agreed. “Ask Pa to tell you about it sometime.” One of the few stories Pa would tell at length was about how he’d decided, after his parents died, that he wanted the only farmhouse in Kansas that was painted like a hippie’s van. And then Ma would cut in and talk about how she and her friends had been driving through in just such a van, and they’d just _had_ to stop at that farmhouse, and the rest was history.

Well, not quite history. There was still a patch of “special” mushrooms growing under the porch, and about a square foot of pot hidden in the cornfield. (They’d let Clark try some of both when he turned 18, but neither of them did anything to him.) Mostly history, though.

The story Pa wouldn’t tell, and Ma wouldn’t tell in front of him, was about how the shrooms and the pot had started out less for fun and more to help with his PTSD. Maybe Kara should hear that story, too. He knew Ma had given her the depressing books, but she might need a little more concrete an example of how Earth wasn’t exactly perfect.

“Pa wanted to paint over it when they found me,” he told Kara. “Thought it’d be better not to draw attention. But Ma said it’d be better if everybody knew our family was a little odd, so that when odd things happened people would say ‘there go the Kents again’ instead of it being a mystery.” She’d also insisted that they keep growing the pot, so that if anyone decided they had something to hide they could investigate and find that without it ever occurring to them that there might be aliens involved.

“I’m glad,” Kara said. “It’s beautiful. There are so many English words for aesthetically pleasing things! Pretty, beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, handsome… it’s delightful.”

“Glad you approve,” Clark said, knowing it was silly to feel so proud; it wasn’t like he’d invented the language, but he loved it too. There was a reason he’d gone into print journalism.

Clark stopped by the farm as often as he could over the next few weeks. It was nice having Kara out and about; he’d felt like he was keeping her a prisoner, locked up in a barn without any natural light, and it hadn’t sat right with him. The powers started coming in right away, once she started getting sunlight, and as he’d suspected, it happened faster than it had with him.

Two weeks after her first day in the sun, he came home and found her down in the old root cellar, eyes squeezed shut and hands over her ears.

“Kara?” he asked, and she flinched.

“It’s too loud,” she said, speaking Kryptonian for the first time in a while. “Too loud, and when I’m outside I can see too far, too much detail. Everything is too much.”

“I know,” he said quietly, his heart aching in recognition. “Listen to my voice right now, okay? Just my voice, nothing else. I know you can do it, because I’ve had to do the same thing. Just listen to me, nothing else. Keep your eyes closed if you want.”

He kept talking quietly for a little while, whatever comforting nonsense popped into his head, and gradually she relaxed, taking her hands off her ears and sitting up. She even cautiously opened her eyes.

“Better?” Clark asked.

“Yeah. Thanks,” she said, back in English. “It’s been increasing gradually, and I thought I could handle it, but…”

“You handled it just fine,” he said. “It’ll be easier once you can fly. When I get overwhelmed I go up where the air’s too thin to carry much noise, or up to the Arctic where there’s nothing to hear.”

“I’ve been trying every day,” Kara said wistfully. “Every evening, when I should have a whole day of sun in me. I’ve been able to jump about as high as the roof, but not actually fly. What does it feel like?”

People were always asking Superman that, and he never had a good answer for them.

“The first time, it felt like… well, I realized gravity had been holding me down my whole life. You don’t even think about it, you know? And then suddenly it didn’t matter any more. It felt like being free when you didn’t even know you’d been trapped.”

“Everything on Earth feels like that,” Kara said fervently.

Clark was still having trouble reconciling the idyllic Krypton he’d always imagined, a lost paradise, with Kara’s description of her own experiences. But he tried not to make that her problem.

“Jumping as high as the roof, huh?” he asked, changing the subject. “You’re controlling the strength okay?”

“I’m being very careful,” she assured him. “You know I’d never hurt Ma or Pa.”

Sometime in the last few weeks, she’d stopped referring to them as Martha and John. It always made Clark feel a little funny to hear. He’d always kind of wanted a younger sibling.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s easy to do something you didn’t mean to, when you’re getting stronger all the time.” He grimaced, realizing he probably ought to address a few awkward topics with her.

“Did you hurt somebody?” she asked sympathetically.

“My girlfriend in high school. It’s hardest to control everything when you’re, well, you know…” He took a deep breath, forced himself to be clinical. “Sexually aroused. I dislocated her hip.”

“Oh,” Kara said quietly. “So… with humans, you can’t…”

“I think maybe I could, if I could practice,” he said. He hadn’t told anyone else all of this, not even Ma and Pa. They’d known about Lana’s hip, of course, but they hadn’t pushed him on the subject of the future. “But how could I practice? I’d hurt people.”

“Damn,” Kara said wistfully. “I should’ve with In-Ze, when we had the chance.”

“If I ever figure out a trick to it, I’ll let you know,” Clark said. It was all he could really offer.

“What about, um. When you’re alone?” Kara asked.

“I usually float,” he confessed. “So I don’t have to worry about denting anything. You might want to wait until that’s an option, now that your strength is coming in.”

“But your…” Kara  made a face, apparently enjoying this conversation as little as he was. “Your ejaculate. Is it… superpowered?”

“No, thank God,” Clark said. That was not a question he’d been expecting, although he supposed it would make sense for Kara to be concerned about properties her own bodily fluids might start to develop. Laser eyes wasn’t actually less weird than super-semen; it just seemed that way because he was used to it. “I always burn it, just to keep there from being Kryptonian DNA lying around in the dump or the sewer, but it doesn’t seem to have any, uh, special properties. And it just sort of dribbles out without much force… but I guess that’s normal for Kryptonians?”

“Yup,” Kara said. “Okay. Good to know. Changing the subject, how will I know when my laser vision’s coming in? I keep worrying I’ll look at something wrong and set the house on fire.”

“You’ll get a sensation of heat in your eyes,” Clark said, extremely glad to be moving on. Kara really did feel like the kid sister he’d never had, and yeesh, that was definitely not a fun conversation to have with a kid sister. “It’s pretty unique. Leave your eyes open but put your hands over them if you feel your eyes getting hot; if your invulnerability hasn’t come in all the way, you’re more likely to damage your eyelids than your hands.”

“Can we test that?” she asked, holding out a hand. “Zap me.”

“Makes sense. I’ll start easy and work up gradually. Let me know if it starts to hurt.” Clark carefully started with something that wouldn’t even have hurt a human hand—more like a laser pointer than a laser gun—and then gradually increased the heat.

“It’s starting to sting,” Kara said when he was about halfway to his maximum.

“Okay,” he said, cutting of the laser with relief—it felt weird, keeping it going for so long. “You’ll probably be fine, then. I’d be surprised if it came in at full strength right away, and even if you do hurt your hand, it’ll heal.” He considered. “Go outside or into the cellar and stare at the ground until you figure out how to switch it off, if you need to. Shouldn’t hurt anything.”

“Thanks, Clark,” she said, and hugged him briefly.

“No problem,” he said. “Are the senses okay? I’d like to check how your strength’s coming along, if you’re okay to come upstairs. I’ll teach you how to arm wrestle.”

“Senses are back under control,” she said, and grinned. “Race you up the stairs.”

She actually beat him—mostly just by being in his way, but she was definitely moving faster than a human could. The arm-wrestling showed that she was getting pretty strong, too.

“I’d have to take you to Dr. Hamilton to get exact measurements, but I’d say you’re about halfway there,” he said.

“If you’re going to take her someplace as Supergirl, she’s going to need clothes for it,” Ma said. She’d watched the arm-wrestling with amusement. “There’s still some of that nano-stuff I made your costume out of left over—”

“I want a skirt!” Kara said. “And one of those shirts that leaves your bellybutton showing!”

“Maybe a skirt with shorts under it,” Clark said. “You’re going to be flying around, and all.”

“Oh. Yes.” Kara blushed.

“Me and that stuff have come to an understanding,” Ma said. “I’ll make you something nice.”


	7. Kara

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: panic attack/PTSD flashback

It turned out that along with a computer database, Jor-El had sent their child off with yards and yards of high-quality nano-fabric. Maybe they hadn’t realized that Kal-El would get superpowers on Earth, and thought they’d need protection; nano-fabric was sturdy stuff, and if anything did manage to damage it, it would replicate to replace the destroyed nanites.

“After we figured out that it would replace any parts that were destroyed, Clark and I tried to get it to make more, but it plain refused. He brought Dr. Hamilton a sample too, but he hasn’t had any luck either,” Ma said, sounding exasperated.

“Of course not,” Kara said, shocked. “They only create replacements when one of them is destroyed. It’s the core of their programming, designed to fail in favor of too few replacements rather than too many.”

“I suppose that’s fair,” Ma acknowledged. “Wouldn’t want to turn the whole world into this stuff.”

“Exactly,” Kara said.

She and Ma worked together on the design. The majority of the nanofabric had gone into Clark’s suit; he offered to shorten his sleeves or his cape so they’d have more, but Kara waved him off.

“I’m serious about the bellybutton shirt. Er, crop top,” she said.

“I think we have enough for a pleated skirt, if we do a short cape,” Ma said, measuring an length of fabric. “If you’d like.”

“Definitely a pleated skirt!” Kara said, bouncing a bit in her excitement. She’d tried one on the other day and been amazed by the way it made her hips look as broad as a human woman’s.

She’d also tried on some bras, and discovered that she was a “B cup.” They seemed a bit unnecessary—her breasts stayed where they were without assistance—but many of them had patterns and bits of lace, secret prettiness that no one but her would see. Probably not something she should wear with her costume, but she liked wearing them with her human clothes.

In the end, she had a red pleated skirt (with red shorts under it), blue boots, a red cape that came down to the small of her back, and a short-sleeved blue crop top with the El sigil in the center of her chest. That part felt a bit odd—she’d never been that excited to be a member of the House of El before—but to humans, that symbol meant Superman. That was probably how he got the name, she realized distantly; she couldn’t imagine Clark asking to be called Superman, but the sigil looked rather like the first letter in “super.” It would be nice if that was what she saw, just a stylized letter S, a symbol of heroism.

It wasn’t. All she could see was the symbol of the House of El, and it just made her _think_ too much, about all the things she’d rather not think about.

That night, Kara woke up in the middle of the night to find that she’d somehow broken Clark’s childhood bed into pieces in her sleep. She could hear Ma and Pa rushing towards her—there must have been a noise—and forced herself to calm down, breathe deeply and evenly.

(She would never be a human, she would always be not only a Kryptonian but an El, Brainiac was still out there and it would find her and Clark and punish them for acting in aberrant ways, she could never, ever escape—)

“Kara!” Ma said, her voice strange.

Kara opened her eyes and found that the room had become coated in frost. Ma and Pa were both shivering. Right, Clark had talked to her about the breath thing, but it seemed so minor compared to everything else, and she’d gone and taken deep breaths to calm herself down.

“Sorry,” she said, and then realized it was in Kryptonian. She repeated the word in English.

“It’s okay,” Pa said. “What’s wrong?”

“Clark was right, you should have left me in the barn. It’s not safe for you to be around me,” she said, and jumped out the window.

It would have been an excellent time for her ability to fly to kick in, but she fell to the ground. At least it didn’t hurt.

“Kara!” Ma called, alarmed.

“Kara, you stay outside if that’s what you need to do, but don’t run off,” Pa said. His voice was calm, even, like this wasn’t any stranger than asking her to pass the salt. “You want us to call Clark?”

“No,” she said immediately, then closed her eyes. She didn’t want to bother him, but he could keep his parents safe from her. “Yes. Call him, please.”

She could hear the whole conversation, Ma saying she thought Kara’d had a nightmare and then some sort of panic attack, Clark saying he’d be right there. And then he was right in front of her, and he hadn’t even bothered to put his costume on. He’d flown out in pajamas.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry, sorry…”

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to be perfect all the time, Kara. Beds can be replaced.”

“Your parents can’t,” she said. “I could have hurt them. I need you to take me somewhere that I can’t.”

“You’re not going to—”

“But I _could_ ,” she insisted. “You know I could. I could have frozen them solid. Take me somewhere I can’t hurt anybody. Please.”

Clark hesitated, then nodded.

“I can’t fly as fast if I’m carrying someone, so we’re more likely to be spotted,” he said. “I’ll go get my costume on. You think you can put yours on, too?”

“Yeah,” Kara said. “Yeah. I’ll pack a bag, too. I think I need to stay somewhere else for a while.”

“If that’s what you want,” Clark said. “I’ll be right back.”

About half an hour later, Clark was holding her and she was holding a duffle bag containing her two prettiest dresses, her prettiest bra, and a few books she hadn’t read yet.

It got colder as Clark flew; Kara could feel it, but it didn’t bother her. She should’ve been shivering with her bare legs and stomach, but she wasn’t.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

“I think so,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see soon,” he said.

The view below them began to be predominated by white. Ice, Kara realized. Clark had mentioned the Arctic before. The sky grew dark, thousands of stars and a beautiful swirl of color overhead. The word “aurora” had been in the dictionary, but Kara had never imagined anything like this. Rao had been too docile a star to throw off enough stellar wind to create such a dramatic effect.

When everything was ice, Clark flew down into a crevice between two glaciers. Everything was blue-white and chillingly beautiful. It was strange, to feel cold so intense without being bothered by it.

“I’d hoped your cold resistance was up to this,” he said. “Glad I was right.”

There was a tunnel out in one of the glaciers, barely visible until they were inside it. It opened into more of a cave on the other side, the floor rough ice and the walls and ceiling polished smooth, like being inside a huge diamond.

The contents of the cave were much more prosaic. A shelf cut in the wall held a variety of frozen soups, a pot, a bowl, and a spoon. Another shelf held a few books. In the corner there was a cot and a sleeping bag.

“When the sound is too much, I come here,” Clark told her.

“Your own little fortress of solitude,” Kara murmured. “It could use some decorating, you know.”

Clark laughed.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“Much.” There wasn’t anybody around as far as she could hear. Nobody she could hurt. “I’m sorry you had to wake up and bring me here.”

“You can go back to the farm any time you like,” he said. “Ma and Pa aren’t mad or anything.”

“Nothing seems to make them mad,” Kara said.

Clark laughed again.

“Yeah, well, you’ve never snuck out of the house on a school night to take your girlfriend flying,” he said. “Believe me, they get mad sometimes. But they aren’t.”

“Okay,” Kara said. She sat down on the cot and drew her knees up to her chest, covering up the House of El sigil.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Clark asked, gingerly sitting next to her.

“Not yet,” she said. “Right now, it still feels so big I _can’t_ talk about it, like it won’t fit through my throat. But I will.”

“I’ll be here,” Clark promised.

“I know,” she said, and gave him a quick, strained smile. “You should go back to Metropolis for now, though. I’ll get some more sleep.”

“You sure you’ll be okay?” Clark asked. “You’ll be kind of stuck here, and even if you had a phone, we’re not exactly in a service area.”

“I’ll be fine,” she promised. “I think solitude is just what I need right now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, now that I've put Kara in a crop-top and a short skirt, I want to talk a little about superheroine costumes. (Feel free to skip this; it's not directly relevant to the story.)
> 
> A lot of superheroine costumes are _extremely silly_. I feel like Power Girl's boob window is the most often-cited example, but hey, she's invulnerable, she can wear what she wants. Personally, I think the version of Huntress' costume that leaves her entire stomach out is the most ridiculous. There are a lot of important organs there, and she doesn't have superpowers! Plus, she does a lot of stealth-based work, and I can't imagine having her entire gleaming white abdomen out can be particularly helpful for that.
> 
> When people complain about how skimpy and sexualized superheroine costumes are compared to their male counterparts, fans of those costumes sometimes accuse their detractors of slut-shaming. This is an entirely vacuous defense. Characters aren't real people. If Helena Bertinelli actually existed, I wouldn't dream of telling her what to wear, but she doesn't. It's the comics creators, the vast majority of whom are men, who picked that outfit out for her, and they did it because they thought comics fans, generally assumed to be straight and male, would be more likely to buy comics that gave them boners.
> 
> All of this is to say that, yeah, I know about the problems with superheroines in skimpy costumes. I definitely will be putting the vast majority of female characters in this setting into clothes that make sense. But my version of Kara is transgender, and that adds an extra wrinkle to the equation. There are plenty of butch trans women, but Kara is a trans teenager just discovering, and delighting in, femininity. I could have put her in basically the same uniform as Clark, but I wanted to emphasize and celebrate her femininity. She's invulnerable; she can wear a crop top and a short skirt if she wants to, and she does.
> 
> I also feel like there's a relevant difference between comics and text here. If this was a comic, the reader would be viewing Kara from the outside; in text, I can put the reader in Kara's head. As words on a page, she's ogleproof in a way that she wouldn't be in comics.
> 
> tl;dr I'm aware of, and agree with, the feminist objections to superheroines in skimpy clothes, but I feel like _this_ version of Kara is a special case and I'm treating her as such.


	8. Clark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I decided ages ago that Metropolis was analogous to Philadelphia in this setting, but when I looked up "bad neighborhoods" in Philadelphia, I was shocked to find that one was actually called Nicetown. That's so much more comic book than anything I could think of. XD
> 
> (Note: the concept of "bad neighborhoods" is extremely problematic, but for reasons that aren't directly relevant to this chapter, so I'm going to avoid writing an essay about it here.)

Clark checked in with Kara before he went to work. She’d changed out of the Supergirl costume and into one of the flower-print maxi dresses she seemed to like so much, and she’d figured out how to heat up the soup with her eyes.

“I’m fine,” she assured him. “I like it here.”

“You’re not getting any sun,” Clark pointed out. “It won’t rise up here for another ten days. You’re not getting any closer to flying.”

“I think I need some time to get used to the powers I have already,” Kara said. “I’m not in that much of a rush.”

“If you’re sure.”

They sat in companionable silence for a moment.

“Krypton used to have ice caps,” she said. “Thousands of years ago. They melted in our Industrial Age.”

“That must have caused a lot of problems,” Clark observed.

“Less than if it happened here, I think,” she said. “Krypton wasn’t mostly ocean like Earth, so there was less coastline to flood. But that was when the Council took control, and the order of the Houses became set. Because we needed order and stability to counteract the chaos of the planet. That’s what the history books said, anyway. But it was the families who owned the factories that caused the problems in the first place who ended up on top.”

“That hardly seems right.”

“It’s what happened,” she said with a shrug. “They had the resources to save people from the flooding. I guess people wanted order more than they wanted justice.”

“Yeah, that’s happened on Earth, too,” Clark said. “Not on that scale, but it does seem like the wrong people come out on top a lot of the time.”

“Do you think we’re the wrong people?” Kara asked.

“I try not to be,” he said honestly. “I think that’s the best I can do. I should get going…”

“That’s fine,” she said. “I think some time in the Fortress of Solitude will be good for me.” She really was insisting on that name, wasn’t she.

“I’ll check on you on my lunch break,” Clark promised, getting her a selection of books and then zipping back to Metropolis. He was in his work clothes and at the _Planet_ just a few minutes late—not that unusual for him.

“Bad timing, Smallville,” Lois said, smirking at him. She seemed to be on her way out the door. “Early bird gets the story.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said good-naturedly. “I’ll try not to accidentally scoop you this time.”

Lois gave him the finger as she walked away.

Clark had put in a few solid hours of work writing about the upcoming mayoral election—boring but necessary—when he heard her scream.

In the bathroom, out the window, shed the work clothes in the alley, quick tug on his hair to get it out of Clark-mode and into Superman-mode, and he was in the air before she’d even stopped for breath. Lois had impressive lung capacity.

She was in Nicetown, the ironically named neighborhood that was widely recognized as the worst in Metropolis, and Superman showed up just in time to see her scream cut off by a punch to the throat.

The man who had punched her was blond, tan, and wearing clothes that were clearly way too expensive for Nicetown.

“Now, there’s no call for that sort of behavior,” Clark said, descending from the sky with his arms crossed. That was enough to cow a lot of people, but this guy just grabbed Lois and put her between himself and Superman.

“I told her I’d only hurt her if she started screaming,” he said in a reasonable tone of voice. “This could have been a perfectly pleasant interview.”

“I’m no reporter,” Clark lied, “but this doesn’t seem like part of normal journalism.”

Lois went to slam the heel of her shoe into the guy’s instep, a move Clark had seen her use to put larger men than this guy on the ground, but he jabbed her in the back of the leg with his knee, effectively blocking her.

“None of that,” he said, still amicable. “This is a friendly conversation.”

“Let her go,” Clark said, rapidly running out of patience.

“Of course,” he said. “I just want to make sure you know, before I do, that I’ve poisoned her, and only I know where the antidote is.” With the arm that wasn’t wrapped around Lois’ neck and shoulders, he held up an empty syringe. Lois did, in fact, have a spot of blood on her arm.

Clark froze.

“It’s fast-acting, too,” the blond guy said. “Too fast-acting to go through proper channels. She might be beyond saving by the time you got me to the police station and they booked me. And I certainly won’t tell if you rough me up.” He let Lois go and she glared at him, clutching her throat.

“So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to take this—” he tossed Superman a cheap flip phone— “and I’m going to walk away. In twenty minutes, as long as you’ve been good and not followed me, I’ll text you the location of the antidote. That should give you just enough time to take care of things.”

“Why should I trust you?” Clark asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

“Trust that I’ve got enlightened self-interest,” the man said. “If I tell you where the antidote is, you save her, and I’m just one of many criminals out there. If she dies, I’m the man who killed Superman’s girlfriend and you’ll hunt me down like a dog. Then either you kill me or you’re an extremely trustworthy witness for a murder-one charge. Neither of us want her to die. See you around, Superman.”

He smirked and began to walk away, hands in his pockets. He was even whistling, the picture of nonchalance.

“Are you okay?” Clark asked Lois. “Your throat—”

“Fine,” she rasped. “Think that asshole killed my source, but I’m fine.”

The whistling was getting farther away, but that was fine, Clark could track it for miles if he had to.

“Who was your source?” he asked.

“LexCorp employee,” she said. “Whistleblower. It was going to be the most satisfying story I’ve ever written.”

“Damn,” Clark said with feeling.

Lois started to laugh, but it turned into a cough.

“I made Superman swear,” she said.

“Off the record, please,” he said, still listening to the whistling… and then it was gone.

Shit. He shouldn’t have fallen for that, should have tracked the guy’s heartbeat or footsteps, not something he could control that easily. Clark scrambled to pick up a trace of the guy again, but it was no good.

“I lost him,” he said apologetically. “Guess we just have to wait.”

Twenty minutes after Clark had caught the phone, it got a text.

“It was just saline,” he read out loud.

“That _fucker_ ,” Lois said with feeling.

“You’d better go to the hospital anyway,” Clark said. “Just in case.”

“Yeah, yeah. Give me a lift?”

“Of course.” He picked her up and had her halfway to the hospital when he heard the sound—distant, but unmistakable—of an earthquake.

“Shit,” he said. “Lois, I’m just going to have to drop you off. There’s an earthquake in… I think it’s China or Japan, I need to get to Asia—”

“Put me down and go, then,” she demanded, and he set her down in front of the hospital before accelerating away.

The earthquake had been off the coast of Japan—a big one. Superman got there just in time to contain the resulting tsunami, using a combination of high-speed flying and cold breath to redirect it, bleeding off the momentum until it was just a harmless wave. He didn’t actually speak much Japanese, but he could hear sounds of panic at a nuclear power plant, so that was his next priority. He zipped around the affected area, keeping the power plant from going critical, rescuing people trapped under rubble, back to the power plant, back to rescuing more civilians. It took hours for the situation to stabilize.

And then he remembered he’d left Kara alone in an ice cave.

When he was sure there wasn’t anybody left to save that the local rescue crew couldn’t handle, and some of them had started politely telling him that they appreciated his assistance but didn’t need any more help from Americans, Clark hauled ass to the Arctic.

Kara was idly carving swirls into the ice of the ceiling with her laser vision.

“Busy day?” she asked.

“Kara, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s okay. I had a bunch of books. Was it newspaper stuff, or…?”

“Nope, Superman stuff,” he said. “Did you happen to hear a deep rumbling sort of noise? You might have been too far away…”

“I did!” she said. “It sounded different from the creaks from the ice melting. What was it?”

“Earthquake,” he said. “A big one, in Japan. I had to help. And before that, some asshole had Lois hostage. I barely got any of my actual _job_ done today.”

“Maybe you should take me to the other pole instead,” Kara said. “It’s sunny there all the time, right? As soon as I can fly, I can help you.”

“Kara, you came out here because you were afraid you’d hurt Ma and Pa,” he reminded her gently. “I think you still need to worry about _you_ for a while.”

She groaned.

“Can I at least start meeting people soon?” she asked. “Lois and Dr. Hamilton and all?”

“If you’re comfortable with that, sure,” he said. “Tomorrow, okay?”

“Sounds good,” she said, and hugged him before he left—he mentally sighed at how her name for it had stuck in his head—the Fortress of Solitude.

He intended to go straight to his apartment and get some more writing done, but Lois was on the roof of the _Planet_ again, this time with tacos.

“You doing okay?” he asked when he landed.

“Aside from being pissed about that guy bluffing us, I’m fine,” she said. “Well, and pissed about him probably killing my source. Can’t find a trace of my whistleblower.”

“I’m sorry,” Clark said, sitting down next to her.

“You do your best, but you can’t read minds,” Lois said. “It’s fine.”

“I can get you a different scoop, though,” he offered.

“Oh, yeah?” she asked.

“First exclusive with the second Kryptonian on Earth? She wants to start meeting people.”

“Not quite as satisfying as having a chance to get at Lex, but I’ll definitely take it,” she said, and smiled.

Clark took a bite of his taco so he wouldn’t kiss her.


	9. Lois

Superman had vetoed Lois’ suggestion of the roof of the  _ Planet _ as an interview location—he said he didn’t want anybody looking up and seeing Supergirl before she was completely ready to be out in public.

It would have made things easier, but privately, she was glad. The roof was for the two of them.

Instead, she got Perry to agree that she could use one of the interview rooms that night, after everyone had gone home and the cleaning staff had finished. He grumbled a bit about how she always had to be the exception, but it wasn’t like he could argue with getting the scoop on Supergirl while nobody else knew what had happened after Luthor managed to get her out of stasis.

(Obviously, every Lexcorp-affiliated news station had made much of Lex’s skill and generosity in doing such a difficult favor for Superman.)

So there she was, in the middle of the night in an empty building with all the blinds shut except on the window that was open for Superman and Supergirl to enter through. It certainly wasn’t the sketchiest way she’d ever met a source, but it felt pretty up there.

And then Superman was there, gently setting Supergirl on her feet before he closed the window and drew the blinds.

Supergirl’s face was as alien as Superman’s, but it seemed she’d been growing her hair out during the time she’d been out of the picture. It was starting to reach down past her shoulders. She also appeared to be wearing a schoolgirl roleplay outfit with Superman’s logo on it, and a short cape.

“Lois, meet Supergirl,” Superman said. “Supergirl, this is Lois Lane. Lois, can I ask that Supergirl’s comments be kept off the record unless we approve them? She’s not really used to talking to humans yet.”

“Well, you can  _ ask _ ,” Lois said automatically. Normally that kind of agreement was for puff pieces and propaganda, not investigative journalism. But this  _ was _ Superman. She sighed. “Fine, I guess. Don’t censor too much of it, please. I’d like to have  _ something _ to report aside from ‘Supergirl exists.’ Supergirl, do you shake hands?”

“Sure,” Supergirl said. She had a slight accent, making the word something like “zure,” but considering she’d only been awake and on Earth for a couple of months, perfect English would be a lot to expect. They shook hands, and Lois could feel how careful Supergirl was being; she barely grasped her hand at all.

“Please, have a seat,” Lois said. “We’ve got the whole place to ourselves. I’ll start you with a softball—the press named Superman, but you seem to have already picked out Supergirl. Any particular reason?”

“Superwoman is too long,” Supergirl said. “Kryptonian names are short. I’m Zor-El, he’s Kal-El—is that okay to say?” she asked, turning to Superman.

“Yeah, people don’t call me that much, but it’s fine for them to know,” he assured her.

“Your English is great,” Lois said.

“Thanks,” Supergirl said. “I’m lucky that Superman’s been working on a Kryptonian-English dictionary for years. We were able to technologically plant knowledge of English in my head.”

“Do you have a lot of technology like that?” Lois asked. This was the first she’d heard of it.

“It only works on Kryptonians,” Clark said apologetically. “Maybe we should keep it off the record?”

“Superman, I’m not the only one who’s going to notice that she learned English so quickly,” Lois said. “Conspiracy theorists will be able to come up with way more sinister options than a language-learning box that you haven’t shared because it wouldn’t work on anyone else.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, sighing.

“Anyway. Supergirl, are you planning to help Superman with his efforts to protect people?”

“Yes!” Supergirl said. “I can’t fly yet, but as soon as I can, I want to help.”

“I’m not sure she’ll be ready that quickly—” Superman started, but Lois interrupted.

“I’m interviewing her, not you,” she reminded him in a poisonously sweet voice. He raised his hands in mock-surrender.

“What do you think of Earth?” Lois asked.

“I haven’t gotten to see much of it yet, but what I’ve seen is amazing,” Supergirl said fervently. “There’s so much life, and so much beauty. I love getting to be a girl—oh, should I not say that?”

“I’ll leave that off the record,” Lois said. “The story we’re putting out—and Lex hasn’t contradicted us, at least not yet—is that gender was very private on Krypton, and we initially used neutral pronouns to talk about you because it took you some time to get used to having yours made public. Nobody’s said anything about sex or gender working differently for your species.”

“Thank you,” Supergirl said. “I wouldn’t mind if it was just me, but…”

“It’s fine,” Lois said. “I don’t out people. That’s not journalism, that’s just being an asshole. Anyway. Your outfit makes, ah, quite a statement. Is that how people dressed on Krypton?”

Supergirl laughed.

“I would never have been allowed to dress like this on Krypton,” she said. “That’s why I love it!”

“You do have shorts or something under the skirt, right?” Lois couldn’t help but ask.

“Shorts, yeah. M—a friend of Superman’s pointed out that I might not want to fly around in just a skirt.”

Lois hadn’t realized Superman had so many friends. She carefully set aside her jealousy.

“Will you also be operating out of Metropolis?” she asked, instead of asking who “M” was. Presumably one of Superman’s “test humans,” a group exclusive enough that it didn’t include her.

“At least at first,” Supergirl said. “I’m sure I have a lot to learn about being a hero, but if anyone can teach me, it’s gotta be Superman.”

It was a great pull quote. Neither of them could possibly object to it. That was way more important than the fact that Supergirl was looking at Superman in a way that could only be described as “adoring,” and he smiled affectionately back at her.

Lois hadn’t thought she had actual  _ competition _ . She wasn’t a jealous person when she was actually in a relationship—as long as she knew where she stood, she didn’t much care what her partner got up to—but this thing with Superman was so nebulous a puff of air could blow it away.

This was not the right frame of mind for this interview. She pushed it away.

“So, I’m mostly asking because you’re calling yourself Super _ girl _ , but how old would you say you are, in Earth terms?” she asked.

“On Krypton, there was a category between child and adult, much more official and clear-cut than anything you have on Earth,” Supergirl said. “It could be compared to being a college student, perhaps? I was in that stage of life. In Earth terms, maybe 18?”

“I know you’re still adjusting to your loss, but do you mind if I ask some questions about Krypton?” she asked.

“I’d rather not talk too much about it, right now,” Supergirl said. “But I guess a few questions would be okay.”

“We thought it was just Superman, and now it’s the two of you. Do you think there are any more Kryptonians out there?” Lois asked.

“No,” Supergirl said. “I guess it’s possible, but I know how he got away and how I got away, and no one else could have used either of those methods. I doubt anyone else survived.”

“Can you tell me a little about Brainiac’s role on Krypton?”

“It was supposed to protect us,” Supergirl said, looking down at her hands. “It stored knowledge, and it made our lives easier, but its first job was supposed to be protecting us, and it let everyone but the two of us die. It can’t be trusted, not at all. It lied, it tried to suppress Jor-El’s reports—”

“Essentially, Brainiac prevented any evacuation attempts,” Superman interrupted. Supergirl looked agitated. “It was keeping Supergirl as some kind of specimen, and it only grabbed her because she was handy. I doubt it values human life any more than it did Kryptonian life.”

Lois had gotten most of this from Superman before, but getting confirmation from Supergirl was helpful.

“Anything else you’d like people to know?” she asked.

“I’m still grieving for Krypton, but I love Earth,” Supergirl said seriously. “This is my home now, and I want to do everything I can to make it a better place, just like Superman does. I know some people are scared of Superman—he had me watch some talk shows, so I’d know what I’m getting into—and I know they’ll be scared of me too. But all I want is to help.”

“God, you’re just like him,” Lois groaned. She wasn’t recording; she could say what she wanted “So sincere and earnest it’s like talking to an after-school special. Being 18-ish and all, do you think you’ll want to cut loose a little more than Superman does?”

“I don’t know that expression,” Supergirl said cautiously.

“She’ll be just as careful as I am, Lois—” Superman started.

“I know that! I’m just asking… well, what do you do for fun, Supergirl?”

“I haven’t figured out everything there is to do on Earth, but I do like to read,” Supergirl said. “Oh! And I like to put on pretty clothes and go places where other people are wearing pretty clothes. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”

“Absolutely,” Lois said, grinning. “Soon as you’re ready to make a more public appearance, you and me are going clubbing.”

Superman put his face in his hands.

“She won’t be able to get drunk,” he said, his voice muffled by his hands. “Alcohol doesn’t affect us.”

“You mean you tried it?” Lois asked in pretend shock. “I’m appalled, Boy Scout.”

“Please focus on the wanting to save people and not the wanting to go clubbing in the article?” Superman asked.

“Cross my heart,” Lois said. She wouldn’t _focus_ on the clubbing. Mentioning it wouldn’t go against their agreement.

“I’m confused,” Supergirl confessed.


End file.
